Each Passing Moment

In Genesis God says to humanity,” Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth . . . .”  God does not, however,  prescribe any minimum number or schedule of procreative events.  Humanity (or, as more reflective of the social reality, “man”kind) was presumed to possess an innate drive for sexual union.  Of course, given the totality of humanity’s history, the above would seem to be something of an understatement.

This notion of an “innate drive” (which we have no more cause to write off as unchosen by us than we have cause to write off an evil nature itself as being unchosen by us) is an important underpinning to a teaching of Jesus in Matthew:

“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you. That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

And it need scarcely be said, that “looking” at a memory or even a fancied image of another person with lust is the same as “looking” in real time.  There are, however, two important lessons to be taken from this teaching of Jesus.  The first should “need scarcely be said,” yet sadly it is: this “lust” business is essentially pervasive in sexually mature humans.  We creatures born to “be fruitful and multiply” are just as the Genesis initiation would presume—wrapped up in the whole business of “lust.”

While individual differences in sex drive, and the imposition of daily cares or untypical stresses, and the advancing of old age, can all serve to temper the sex-driven logic of Genesis, yet the logic is ever-present in scripture: sex (as sometimes distinct from particular “sexual duties”) is the logic of mature human physicality.  Contentions about this or that person’s chaste purity of thought life are as likely to be false as to be real.

This leads to the second lesson inherent in the “looketh on a woman to lust after her” passage.  “Adultery” is about faithlessness to a relationship—with all that the relationship entails.  Making adultery about faithfulness merely to intimacy is a fool’s errand, especially since (for example) a man’s wife can become for him as much as a dehumanized image (a “lusted after” woman) as any other fancy he might have for another, real or imagined.

And so adultery—along with its vanquishing—hinges on the responsible individual responding to innumerable instances in life which present choices and challenges.  Every duty to one’s spouse is important, and the fact of everyone—let’s face it—being lacking in perfect discipline of mind does not make every marriage an example of adultery, either vitiated overall or doomed to an endless cycle of apology and reconciliation.  It simply means that all marriages have moments of adultery, and moments of fealty, and moments of intimacy, and moments of alienation.  The healthy and halting progression of moments is what leads to an improved relationship.

Of course, it must be obvious that I am emphasizing this blog’s insistence on “moments.”  Often “moments” chiefly understood in their relative isolation can be incomparably preferable to “story-arcs” of human behavior, “story-arcs” that twist together and twist together again moments of impulsive behavior with extended episodes of behavior in which we try to make stories of justification or rationalization for what we have done and what we feel bound to do.  If only we could learn to say to ourselves, “Stop!  One thing does not necessarily lead to another!”

In regard to Jesus’ teaching about adultery, the “man” in question is presented with some salient facts.  He has lusted, and he has been thereby unfaithful to his relationship, and he cannot wish away what he has just thought, and he cannot pretend that he is to be spared the lot of lustful mankind, and he cannot make that lot an excuse for his behavior—and so on and on.  Just that one moment of evil thought is enough to make a lifetime of sorting-out for the man—if he could really spare a lifetime to sort it out.  Of course, life must go on, and a man who is taught—and who teaches himself—to let such moments rest as burning—and, fear not, dissipating—lessons within himself can go on with life.  Life will bring other moments enough, and we will never have time to come to conscious resolution of all the moments we regret.

Or we can make of our life “story-arcs,” doing this or that because of what we have already done.  This tragic tendency is amply illustrated in the story of what is rather revealingly known as David’s “great sin.”  David commits adultery with Bathsheba and has Bathsheba’s noble husband, Uriah, killed.  (David also does other things, like taking an illicit census and getting seventy thousand people killed thereby, but, you know, whatever.)  The sordid Bathsheba episode is what has captured the attention of history.

Of course, the emphases of history change over time, and of late it has been fashionable (and none too soon) to wonder if simple “adultery” between David and Bathsheba is truly what happened.  Surely David was guilty as an adulterer, but did Bathsheba really have a choice?  In a parallel vein, however, a revisionist view of the “David and Bathsheba” story might profit from applying the “moment-by-moment” approach of this blog.  David committed an evil act with the physical adultery (to say nothing of the conceptual adultery that preceded it), but once he had committed himself to the “story-arc” of his behavior, he made himself unavailable to the warnings that each passing moment might bring.

David took Bathsheba, and David had Uriah killed, and that is what the story (or our lore of the story) remembers.  But David in the process “linked-in” a moment that, in itself, ought to have given him pause indeed.  This was the David whose great early years were spent in the company of his soldiers (company that Uriah insists on sharing vicariously even surrounded by the comforts of Jerusalem), yet David orders Joab not simply to kill Uriah, but also to engineer the noble soldier’s death in the field.  Uriah did not die by himself—David’s evil stratagem through Joab brought about not merely Uriah’s death, but also the deaths of men in Uriah’s company—men scarcely remembered today, and yet who were memorialized in Second Samuel as “some of the people of the servants of David”—one of the saddest phrases in all the Old Testament.

As I wrote above, the grinding and horrid logic of the David and Bathsheba story is that David made himself unavailable to the warnings that each passing moment might bring.  That is a lesson that can help us understand Jesus’ wrenching warnings about lust and adultery.